Biometric authentication performs authentication based on features of a body part, such as a fingerprint, veins, a facial image, and an iris, have been put into practical use. Biometric authentication typically uses an enrolment stage and an authentication stage. During the enrolment stage, the biometric data of users are acquired and stored in a database. During the verification stage, biometric data of a user requesting authentication is compared with the stored biometric data. If there is a match, then the user is allowed access.
One of the considerations for achieving the biometric authentication is whether or not the same features of the biometric data obtained at the enrolment stage may be obtained at the authentication stage. For example, in biometric authentication based on palm veins, high-accuracy authentication can be performed by acquiring and storing features of palm veins of an upper right part of a user's palm at the time of enrolment and acquiring features of palm veins of a lower left part of the palm at the time of authentication. U.S. Pat. No. 8,264,325 describes one method for biometric authentication.
In addition, it can also be required to perform the authentication in a secure manner. For example, the biometric data of enrolled user are often analyzed and stored by a third party. It is important that the private biometric data are not revealed to the third party. Similarly, the privacy of the biometric data presented for the authentication also should be preserved.
It is often required to securely determine a result of a function applied to encrypted signals. For example, a distance between two encrypted signals can be measured using a variety of functions, such as least/weighted squared error, or Hamming distance. In turn, the distances between two signals are widely used for various authentication purposes. This problem is often defined as a secure multiparty computation (SMC). Computationally secure methods, such as oblivious transfer (OT), secure inner product (SIP) can be used as primitives to perform more complicated operations. U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/005,293 describes such a method.
Accordingly, there is a need for a method authenticating an encryption of biometric data of the user.